The door was slightly open when Darcy made it up the landing to her apartment, and she rushed inside, calling Claire’s name.
“Hey, sexy!” Claire replied, leaning out of the doorway to her bedroom, hanging by one hand to the frame, her body leaning at a near-45 degree angle to the wall.
“Where have you been?” Darcy asked, rushing to her roommate and holding her by her arms, scanning her for signs of… something. Anything that would account for her recent odd behavior would have been welcome.
“I told you,” Claire said, her voice light and dreamy. Her eyes, too, were heavy-lidded, as if she were in the throes of a particularly mellow drug trip. “I was at the shoe store. Only it wasn’t just the shoe store.” She pressed her forefinger to her lips in a shushing gesture and grinned. “It was somewhere else. I wish you coulda been there.”
“Okay, I’m putting you in bed and we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
“Mmmmm,” Claire purred, lifting her leg against the other and shrugging, giving Darcy an inviting smile. “I love it when you get all demanding.”
For an instant, Darcy’s mind cast back to the night before, the sounds of Claire’s body responding to her touch, the desire in Darcy to join in. Something in Claire’s smile suggested that she would not be turned away if she attempted to push her into a tangled embrace, but her behavior was too out of character for Darcy to feel comfortable with the idea.
“Good. Bed, now.” Darcy pointed toward the bed and Claire moved inside the pink glow of the bedroom.
Darcy followed her inside, scanning the room for signs of drugs or booze or an empty bottle of pills… something to help make sense of it all. Claire was no slut, and yet every word out of her mouth dripped sexual suggestion. The slinky manner of her walk, the way she crawled onto the bed on all fours, showing her ass to Darcy, it was as if someone far more lascivious had slipped into Claire’s skin.
She wasn’t sure if Claire’s new outfit came from Foot Traffic or this mysterious back room, but the blue knit dress that showed off her toned legs had been replaced by something out of a fantasy movie. Her feet were clad in satiny ballet slippers, pale blue, as were the ribbons that wrapped around her calves. The dress was a similar pale blue, covering her hips and chest, wide ribbons criss-crossing her belly and back, wide satiny bands of a matching color around her thighs. Over the dress, a gauzy film of silk covered her, and Darcy noticed small-petaled white flowers woven into her hair, as if she were queen of the nymphs or something.
“Are you gonna join me?” Claire asked, patting the unmade bed.
“Get some sleep,” Darcy replied, knowing it wasn’t a direct answer, but the truth was, she did want to join her, to slide her body against the soft fabric and unwrap her roommate like a panting birthday present. “We’ll talk about where you were tomorrow.”
“It was so nice,” Claire whispered, her hands roaming over her chest and resting there. Were her breasts larger? It had to be a trick of the light, or the way the ribboned dress held her, but it certainly looked like Claire had gone up almost a cup size since Darcy saw her the night before. “There were so many of them and they were dancing all around and then I was dancing, too.”
It wasn’t just her chest, Darcy realized. Her hair, always a bright red, cut in a bob not unlike Darcy’s, was longer, and beginning to curl at the tips. Perhaps she had gotten extensions or was having some hormonal explosion that made her hair experience a burst of growth along with her breasts. That felt rational, Darcy thought, and rational felt good.
“Tomorrow,” Darcy repeated and closed the bedroom door, leaning against it and sighing. As turned on as she was by Claire’s change in demeanor, it scared her, too. She might even have to call Claire’s parents, and wouldn’t that be an uncomfortable phone call?
Drifting away from the door, Darcy heard unbridled moans from within the bedroom, another round of self-pleasuring begun. She found she was too concerned to properly enjoy it, instead retiring to the couch. Though the sounds were no less discernible here, she could turn the television up to mask most of them.
Claire was still moaning when Darcy fell asleep, filling her dreams with the sweet song of lust.
